Writer/director
Jordan Peele's Get Out is a daring and
auspicious directorial debut. It's a horror film, although to classify it as one
seems too limiting in regards to the film's purpose and accomplishments. In
fact, it feels like a bit of a cop-out when Peele's screenplay decides upon a
fairly routine, horror-centric path during the climax in order to resolve its
conflict. The turn doesn't undo everything that has come before it, but one
can't help but feel disappointed that Peele doesn't take this material to its
logical end.

It
doesn't matter too much, though, because what is here is a subversive and
sardonic look at modern race relations, as seen through the lens of a pretty
standard horror-movie setup. Peele's screenplay is perceptive in the way it
addresses a veneer of apparent racial harmony as a means of disguising more
sinister ideas. Its targets aren't obvious, either. The setting may be an almost
plantation-like estate somewhere in the South, but it's populated by characters
whose views on race appear—at least at a cursory glance—to be enlightened.
The patriarch of the home even proudly announces that, if he had the chance, he
would have voted for Barack Obama for a third term.

That
information is fodder for conversation, sure, but it takes on a different
meaning in the context of a father's conversation with his daughter's boyfriend.
It has an even greater significance when one takes into account the fact that
the boyfriend is black, and it sure as hell means something when it's an issue the
father rather awkwardly inserts into conversation within the first ten minutes
of meeting said boyfriend. At that point, it's not conversation. It's an
announcement—of the father's more-than-tolerant levels of acceptance, of his
ability to see a "post-racial" world, of, essentially, his liberal
bona fides. It's not for the boyfriend's benefit that the girlfriend's dear old
dad says it. It's for his own.

This is
the kind of observation that Peele sneaks in throughout the film, without making
a big deal of any of it. He opens the story with an ordinary scene that turns
chilling pretty quickly. An African-American man (Keith Stanfield) is walking
down a suburban sidewalk, uncertain of where he's going. A car pulls up behind
him, and this man—and the audience—knows that such a scene—of a black man
walking where suburbanites might believe he doesn't belong—can have and has
had a terrible outcome. It's a brief but potent introduction to what Peele does
with the rest of the film—establishing a reason for suspicion, laughing it
off, confirming those suspicions, and forcing us to deal with the consequences.

The
central story follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a city-living photographer whose
girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams, who really shines as her character's
loyalties are solidified) is bringing him home to meet her parents. After a
brief scare on the road involving a deer and a cop who might be crossing a
prejudicial line, Chris meets her father Dean (Bradley Whitford) and mother
Missy (Catherine Keener).

They
both seem nice enough, although Missy and Rose have to keep apologizing for her
husband's enthusiasm. He drops, "My man," a few too many times for
comfort. For his part, Dean has to apologize for the optics of his house
staff—the always-smiling Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and Walter (Marcus
Henderson)—who, yes, are both black but who worked for his parents and whom he
really would have felt bad about firing. Everything about Dean basically
screams, "I'm a good guy and totally not racist in the slightest."

That's
a reason for suspicion. So, too, is Missy's insistence that she help Chris quit
smoking through hypnosis. As for Rose's young brother (Caleb Landry Jones), he
seems to have strange obsessions with fighting Chris—just for
"play," of course—and pointing out something about the "genetic
makeup" of his sister's new beau. It's also the weekend of the family's
annual get-together with neighbors and friends, and they are all reflections of
Dean's need to show off their tolerance ("I know Tiger," one neighbor,
a former pro golfer, makes sure to tell Chris).

For a
long stretch, the film doesn't even play as horror, save for a relatively early
scene in which Missy displays her hypnosis skills (This sequence not only is
precisely abstract—imagining a "sunken place" in which Chris
helplessly watches the world as if through a television screen, akin to the
defining trauma of his life—but also sets up a rationale for an otherwise bad
decision he makes late in the story). It's primarily a comedy, featuring a
finely tuned perception of the strange ways in which race still defines social
interactions. Even the film's most shocking moment, in which the party turns
into a pantomime of an old and disgraceful practice, is something of a punch
line—a demented joke, yes, but also an audacious one. It helps there's
something of a running commentary on the absurdity of the plot from Chris' best
friend, a conspiracy-minded TSA agent played by a scene-stealing LilRel Howery
(whose delivery of one line is so perfect that it's a shame the film doesn't end
with it).

Peele
takes his satire right to the edge of condemnation, and perhaps it's for the
best that Get Out doesn't take the leap (The motives behind what's happening
at the house ultimately have little, if anything, to do with race). Still,
considering how well Peele handles the thorny issues that are present here, one
can't help but wonder what the filmmaker could have mined if he had taken the
leap. If anything, that response is certainly a sign of a promising debut.